Glugging in the intersections of time and knowing cause and effect with time to pause and reflect, so that what is left behind is idealized. Coming to terms with events in your past, rewriting them with a positive spin, as each of time’s shapes arrives in loops, the quadradirectional cogniscent allows time to prepare for and deal with the shapes of the arriving present.

Jake Borndal lives and works in New York. He recently received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Solo exhibitions include Chit Chat at ΚΘΦ Gallery, Richmond; Pot Holder at Gallery Four, Baltimore; and Pot Hole at Terminal Projects, Brooklyn. His work has been included in group shows at venues such as Material Art Fair, Mexico City; Reunion Gallery, Zurich; Mass MoCA; Le Magasin, Grenoble; MoMA PS1, Postmasters Gallery, and Pierogi in New York, among others.

An artist book entitled Solipsistic Trollop Mystic will accompany the show with writing by Savannah Knoop and Kate Scherer.

440 Gallery is proud to present, Titanicae, a show of new work by artist Katharine Colona Hopkins. For her third solo show with the gallery, Hopkins has created an installation that explores the patterns and phenomena of organisms that survive in extreme environmental conditions. The show's title refers to a bacteria found on wreckage from the Titanic, a species that has adapted to feed on the ship's metal surface. The show opens Thursday, February 19th, with an artist reception on Friday, February 20th.

Hopkins began with the creation of small cups, crafted from paper pulp, which as singular objects are delicate and fragile. When combined with well over a thousand others, however, the effect points to the power that individual organisms can have when they form large collectives, as witnessed in Halomonas titanicae's ability to consume a massive man-made ship. Individually painted in deep browns and vibrant blues, the cups create a sprawling mass across the gallery wall. On the opposite wall Hopkins plays with the idea of containment. When placed within the confines of a frame - pattern, form, and repetition pay homage to natural processes and organisms while highlighting a deeply engrained human need to control and contain.

This show marks a departure for Hopkins from representational painting and drawing. However, the themes of decay and renewal remain constant throughout her body of work. In her last show at the gallery, That Perfectly Arranged Mouth (2013), she exhibited paintings of dead animals, in vibrant unnatural colors. The effect was less grim than elegiac. Whereas Rite (2010) was an exploration of sacred spaces and featured an animated film of an imaginary underground passage.

Hopkins received an M.F.A. in Printmaking from Colorado State University, and a B.A. in Political Science from Colorado College. She has an Advanced Certificate in Art Education from Pratt Institute. She has exhibited extensively in the United States and her work is in private collections here and abroad. The show runs through March 22nd. Please visit the website for information on related events.

440 Gallery is located at 440 Sixth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, between 9th and 10th Streets, and is convenient to the F, G, and R subways. The gallery is open on Thursday and Friday, 4-7pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 11am - 7pm, or by appointment.

American Medium is pleased to present new sculpture, video and wall works by Harm van den Dorpel. Just-in-Time is Harm van den Dorpel's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Just-in-Time will be on view from February 20th - April 3rd.

Harm has a Wikipedia page. Harm is 33-34 years of age. Wikipedia calls him a ‘conceptual artist'. What the fuck does that mean in 2014?

[Madonna:]
Come on boy I've been waiting for somebody to pick up my stroll
[Justin:]
Now don't waste time, give me desire, tell me how you wanna roll

Harm has chosen me to write about his work because I seem like someone who hates the art world, a post-artist, someone who has decided to give up. I'm trying to gauge if he wants me to tear his practice apart. I'm trying to figure out what that would mean. Is it BDSM?

The title of the show, Just In Time, reminds me of 'Justin’ and ‘In Time', Timberlake's flop star turn in the 2011 dystopian Sci-Fi thriller. Like all Sci-Fi movies it was about the time when it was made. In the film time is literally money. You buy and sell your minutes, your years. The rich have more time. The usual, then. NYC.

[Madonna and Justin:]
If you want it
You've already got it
If you thought it
It better be what you want

I think the show is 'about’ programmer workflows and how they are visualized in corporate environments. Charts and drawings and post-its and mind maps and shit.

Harm:
the aim of the text is not to make sure people will want to see the show
i think it should be more about giving context
im very very confused about being an artist
as you might have noticed in the chats

Jaakko:
yeah
i'm confused about it too, like my ‘practice’

Harm:
on the verge of quitting all the time

I'm scrolling up this Facebook chat window. We've been chatting about the press release a lot. What can be said? Nothing has been said, almost. Harm's responses are evasive (elusive?), which might be fine. I feel like my role is to understand and report back, but maybe that's not necessary. I'm kinda over understanding tbh. I'm into being near something. I don't really get Harm's work. I can be near it though.

[Madonna:]
You gotta get em a heart
Tick tock tick tock tick tock

“Men always want to be influential. I see that somewhat as an onlooker. Do I see myself as influential? No, I want to understand. If others understand in the same way I’ve understood that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like being among equals.”
– Hannah Arendt

Harm:
i think thats the point of doing it
putting some thoughts and ideas there, and then see what other people think about that
thats the thrill
in this quote of hers, im not on the side of the ‘men’

Harm has introduced this quote into our chat. He is onto something. I immediately challenge him in a predictable way, pointing out that Hannah Arendt was massively influential and accomplished, that this humility rings false.

We start talking about failure and I paste a quote about how failure exhibited is reframing it as a success and somehow really neoliberal or something. I'm trying to be analytical and sharp but I'm kinda worn down and foggy.

Harm van den Dorpel's work is about language, process and infrastructure. When he makes images they are about other images. They're like lol what is an image anyways.

[Justin:]
But if I die tonight at least I can say I did what I wanted to do
Tell me how 'bout you?

“There are various ways to become invisible: one is to become transparent; another is to put up an opaque shield. Neither tactic is fully realizable.”
– Elvia Wilk

Harm:
one way is to be like a chameleon and mimic your environment
then people also dont see you

I think I kinda want what Harm wants but I'm using opposite methods. He wants to be invisible so as not to be influential, to not be one of the men. He wants to understand. He has chosen an opaque shield. Maybe the shield changes color according to its surroundings. It's online and off. I'm trying to be transparent.

Harm:
i tried to read agamben
and he says something interesting about absolute potentiality
which means
decide to rather not do anything
i just in general feel incapable of expressing in art pieces the stuff that really interests me

Two things stick out to me. First of all I'm like wait are you reverse psychologizing me to legitimize your practice for you by saying that it has nothing to do with what really interests you? Then I'm like wait how does not doing anything work up to absolute potentiality.

Harm:
maybe im trying to legitimize my focus on process, thought and all other aspects of creation that happen before actually creating something substantial and possible to communicate . maybe decide in the end to leave it unrealized, unactualized
uncommunicated
because the incentives to actually make something are unclear to me - because they are so wound up in other processes. like market stuff, and who's going to see it anyway

[Madonna and Justin:]
If you want it
You've already got it
If you thought it
It better be what you want

If you feel it
It must be real just
Say the word and
I'm gonna give you what you want

As difficult as it is to make art, perhaps it’s even harder to destroy it once it’s made.

Destruction—literally, figuratively, formally, and conceptually—has a long and well-known pedigree in modern and contemporary art. From Robert Rauschenberg to Jean Tinguely, Robert Smithson, Yoko Ono, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, and Pipilotti Rist, destruction has served as a rich resource in the evolution of critical art practice and a key idea in the development of the expanded field of art in the 1960s and 1970s.

Yet what might be its aesthetic and critical place in culture today? In order to explore these and related questions, the curators have invited the artists not to destroy just something, but rather one of their own preexisting works—and to develop a protocol for this act of destruction that will become, at some level, what is being exhibited. How does the destruction of an artist’s own work ask us to rethink issues of materiality, performance and memory? How does it enable us to think about the changing conditions of art history in the digital age?

Included in the exhibition is a newly destroyed piece by Bob and Roberta Smith, whose exhibition Art Amnesty was previously shown at Pierogi and is on view at MoMA P.S.1 through March 23, 2015, and a video documenting the destruction of faulty elements of Nina Katchadourian’s Monument to the Unelected, a work consisting of 56 signs advertising the presidential campaigns of every person who ever ran for president, and lost, and now in the permanent collection of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (the work was also exhibited at the Boiler in July, 2012). Also on view will be a re-staging/destruction of Jeanine Oleson’s Hear, Here (2014), an experimental Opera produced at the New Museum in April, 2014. Ray Smith will direct a live destruction of a monumental exquisite corpse-like sculpture.

The exhibition coincides with the establishment of the Foundation for Destroyed Art (www.foundationfordestroyedart.org), a non-profit media archive in which works of art will exist only in their documented destruction and spectral afterlife. The aim of the Foundation is to serve as a unique online resource and archive of destroyed works available in virtual formats, an institution that can hold if not entirely contain the formlessness of destruction in the field of art.

Trestle Gallery is proud to present the newest works by painter Arlan Huang. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Huang describes his current practice as “looking at myself from the outside.” In 2014, Huang reacquainted himself with his entire body of work through a cataloging process facilitated by a Creating a Living Legacy award from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. This act of retracing allowed Huang to review his painting career through an experienced lens. With Huang’s newest body of work he chooses to embrace awkwardness and paint with a layered perspective about his artistic decisions and the aspirations he held as a younger painter.

From this intensive look into his own history, Huang found that he has been “doing the same things over and over again,” with subtle shifts in color and line from one painting to the next. His search for a meditative “hum” while he paints is ever present as he experiments with the surface, color, and fluid movement of his abstract imagery. The results are layered and stacked linear marks, neat rows, or floating daubs of paint.

Arlan Huang (1948) was born in Bangor, Maine and was raised in San Francisco. Huang studied at San Francisco Art Institute (1964-65), City College of San Francisco (1966-69) and received his BFA from Pratt Institute (1972). Huang has permanent installations throughout New York, including the Museum of Chinese in Americas, Jacobi Medical Center, and Baron Capital, and has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Board of Education, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. Recent solo exhibitions include Red for Yellow (2013), Flatfile Gallery, Japan; and Most Violet Paintings 2003-2008 (2008), Walter Randel Gallery, NYC. Huang has exhibited extensively in group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Front Room Gallery is proud to present “Lost Horizon” a solo exhibition of new works by the artist, Mark Masyga. Featuring painting and sculpture, Masyga's compositions have lively linear elements balanced with a sensitive, yet intense sense of color. Mark Masyga uses line to enhance both specificity and ambiguity, creating a sense of mystery.

Building from concepts in previous works, which refer to imagery of construction sites, ruins or natural disasters, Masyga is now minimizing his use representational references. These new works focus on Masyga's development of his visual vocabulary, utilizing mark-making, forms, and style as indicators which infer rather than direct to these references. Building from the core concepts stemming from the origin of 'utopia', Masyga's recent works hint at locale and structure, but rely on the integrity of the forms, linework and palette in an insulated manner. There is a playfulness in the search and discovery within Mark Masyga's recent body of work which is challenging and engaging.

Created concurrently with the paintings are constructions made with wood, plaster, Structolite and other materials. Masyga's sculptural works amplify and resonate with the paintings, activating a nuanced experience, as seen independently and in tandum with his two-dimensional works. These pieces evoke landscape and exhibit architectural traits in a different way than the paintings do, while maintaining a high degree of specificity. The Folly of Fragonard is the second in a series of larger-scale sculptural works. The work on display is a re-imagination of Fonthill Abbey, the infamous Gothic revival English country house built (and ultimately collapsed under its own weight) under the hasty direction of William Thomas Beckford, circa 1813.

Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine, masters of improvisation and drone, come together for a special duo concert at Brooklyn’s First Unitarian Congregational Society. Presented by ISSUE Project Room as part of a two-night celebration of Conrad’s 75th birthday, the evening-length performance pairs Conrad on violin with Palestine on pipe organ, grand piano, and voice.

In 2014 ISSUE presented Palestine’s first New York performance on the pipe organ, but his mystical techniques were first hatched in 1964 at the Unitarian Church on Central Park West. It was at Saint Thomas Church next to the Museum of Modern Art, where Charlemagne played carillon bells every afternoon during the sixties, that Conrad and Palestine were first introduced; as Palestine tells it, Conrad was drawn up by the church’s bell towers clanging, to find Palestine manning the bells. They became fast friends. Their nearly 5 decades-long association has seen few collaborations; in 2006, after a 30-year hiatus they released “An Aural Symbiotic Mystery“ (Sub Rosa), which Pitchfork called “the most inspired release of either of their careers.“

Conrad’s birthday celebration continues the following Saturday, March 7th at 6:30pm, with “Tony Conrad at 75,” a benefit for ISSUE Project Room hosted by Greene Naftali gallery. The night includes performances by Tony Conrad & Jennifer Walshe, David Grubbs & Eli Keszler, John Miller, Tony’s brother Dan Conrad, and more.

Tony Conrad is a pioneering visual artist, filmmaker, violinist, composer, and sound artist. In the 1960s, he was a leading figure in the development of minimalist music and was an early member of the Theater of Eternal Music, along with John Cale, La Monte Young, and others. As a visual artist, Conrad's acclaimed multidisciplinary work has been featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the 2009 Venice Biennale, and in solo exhibitions around the world. He is represented by Greene Naftali gallery in New York and Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Germany. Conrad’s early career is the subject of a study by Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone, 2008). He is also a founding member of the ISSUE Project Room Board of Directors.

Charlemagne Palestine is an American composer, performer, visual, video and installation artist born in Brooklyn. A contemporary of Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Phill Niblock, and Steve Reich, Palestine has invented and performed intense, ritualistic musics since the sixties, intended to instill new expectations of beauty and meaning in sound in Western audiences. A composer-performer originally trained to be a cantor in synagogue, he has always performed his own works as soloist. His earliest pieces were compositions for carillon, voice and electronic drones, and he is perhaps best known for his intensely performed piano works, entitled Strummings. Palestine's performance style is ritualistic and shamanistic. He surrounds himself and his instruments with magical clothes and stuffed animal divinities, and begins every performance playing crystal glasses filled with cognac. In recent years he has been collaborating with many other performer/musicians around the world including Rhys Chatham, Z’ev, Oren Ambarchi, Perlonex, Mika Vaino, Gol, Mondkopf, Grumbling Fur among many others. Since 1999 Charlemagne resides in Brussels Belgium.

The Journal Gallery is pleased to announce “Gumbo Shoes,” Leif Ritchey’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

In “Gumbo Shoes,” Ritchey presents a new series of paintings derived from the idea of change, and how one adapts to it. Utilizing the artist's self-taught process of applying paint onto wet, unstretched canvas, the works in “Gumbo Shoes” follow the trajectory of Ritchey's previous works in their reference to contemporary fresco painting and the sometimes unexpected results of this process.

You can't step into the same river twice.
Nature keeps moving,
Take a walk on the wild side into the dark musk of the unknown.
Let's go down to electric avenue,
Infrared to ultraviolet, holographic, metallic, fluorescent and flower essences.
Moon kissed city. Architecture as frozen music, eye dance, eye tunes, with every song air waves fade and echoes bending corners out of cars, and bars float on by between silence and light reflecting, bouncing off steel and glass, mud and plants—the river of darkness.
In the treasury of the shadows patterns emerge—form to formlessness follow the flow of the times.

Leif Ritchey was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1975 where he currently lives and works. His solo exhibitions include “Sun Tea” at ltd Los Angeles, CA (2014), “Poster Paintings” at Shoot the Lobster, New York, NY (2012), “Chameleon Jeans” at Martos Gallery, New York, NY (2011), and “Spots” at The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2010). Leif Ritchey’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including “To The Happy Few” at Jeanroch Dard, Paris, France (2014), “LIFE” The Journal Gallery at Venus over Manhattan in New York, NY (2014), “Dirt Don’t Hurt” at Jolie Laide Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2011), and “Material Matters and other Issues” at CANADA, New York, NY (2010), among others.